This October 31 is the 490th anniversary of the day Martin Luther nailed a few minor concerns about the Catholic Church to a cathedral door. For that reason, I offer this link to quotes from Luther’s guide to prayer.
I have wanted to be a man of prayer for a long time, but it is one of the hardest things I try.
Vivienne Parry asks why wet feet brings on putrid fever or the like in many literary heroines. “For, I confess,” she writes, “part of me has always longed to grab them and say: ‘You only got your slippers wet. For heaven’s sake, girl, just get a grip!'” (via Books, Inq.)
Ack. I’m worthless tonight. I’m in the grip of some kind of vague, unlocalized malaise, probably psychosomatic. Had to slug my way through work. My body seems to be saying to me, “Take it easy and feed me protein,” and that’s what I’m doing.
All in all, I’m glad I live in Minneapolis, and not southern California. All the world wants to live in S. Cal, but we Norwegians (at least the ones who haven’t absconded to Mission Viejo) sit here and say, “Yeah, the weather might be nice most of the time, but you gotcher earthquakes. You gotcher wildfires. Better to stay home where the disasters are usually less catastrophic, and generally come on a scheduled basis.”
It’s a particularly Norwegian point of view, I think–“I won’t ask much, but in return I expect very few bad surprises.” Comes from generations of explaining to our children why we continued to live in a place where the sun didn’t even rise half the year.
Same goes for living in Minnesota, more or less.
I was sent a quotation once. Forget who said it. Somebody commented on Charles Lindbergh’s not having much of a sense of humor, and the quotee replied, “Did you ever try to tell a joke in Minneapolis?”
To which my reply is, “Remember Lou Grant? Remember how funny his life was on the Mary Tyler Moore show, set in Minneapolis? Then he spun off to Los Angeles and his own show, and the yucks stopped cold.”
I think that settles that.
In closing, here’s a YouTube link from Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost. The kind of counselor all of us neurotics dream of (played by Bob Newhart, no less). He’s just as effective as all the others, and charges you less.
Another beautiful day. Bright sun, and it got up to about 70 in the afternoon, I think, though it was much cooler by the time I took my afternoon walk, which has suddenly become an evening walk.
The wind’s blustery, which is too bad, because it means the trees that turn their leaves early are shedding them now. So when the great crescendo of the visual chorus that is autumn arrives at last, they’ll have no “voices” left. The perfect weather for fall is still and dry for a couple months.
Not that I’ve got any business complaining about high winds, considering what’s going on in southern California.
Today I want to strike a blow for precision in language. I want to smash, and smash vengefully, a common error that seems to be growing more and more common.
How often these days do we read a sentence like this: “In lieu of the senator’s statement, advocacy groups organized a massive letter-writing campaign”?
This is bad. Don’t do this anymore.
What the writer meant to say was, “In view of the senator’s statement…”
“In lieu of” and “in view of” are not the same thing.
The phrase, “In lieu of” is defined by Merriam-Webster this way: “in the place of; instead of.”
If someone says, “During the war, we ate margarine in lieu of butter,” he’s using the words properly.
Why do people make this mistake?
Because they’re trying to use a fancy, frenchified word in lieu of a perfectly good, easily understood English one.
When in doubt, use the simple word. When not in doubt, the simple word is still usually the best bet.
Now read this post again. Read it over and over until you understand it.
The world will be happier for it.
Or at least I will.
Writing is No Longer Manly with the Possible Exception of Australian Travel Writers, reports David Thayer.
Pastor Tim Keller of Redeemer PCA in New York City apologetically announces his new books, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. He wants to avoid the appearance of hype, but now that the news has hit the blogosphere there’s no stopping the hype. It will take on a life of its own, ha, ha. Really, it looks like a good book. He says, “Ever since I got to New York nearly two decades ago I’ve wished I had a volume to give people that not only answered objections to Christianity (what has been called ‘apologetics’) but also positively presented the basics of the gospel in an accessible yet substantial way.” Only Mere Christianity does that, he says, and it doesn’t address some issues pertinent today. So Keller has written the dual purpose book himself, not to replace Mere Christianity, but to add to the modern intellectual debate on God.
Contest: The Rap Sheet will “give a copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing to the person who can send us the cleverest Leonard-related five-line limerick.” See The Rap Sheet for details.
Perfect fall day today. The rains finally ceased, and Saturday was pretty nice, giving me the chance to do some maintenance jobs outside. Today was crisp and bright, with gumdrop colors in the foliage.
Which makes it all the sadder to hear about the fires in southern California. Our prayers go out to you folks in that area.
Stephen Hunter’s Pale Horse Coming is another thriller so good, so deeply satisfying on so many levels, that it makes me want to just hang up my laptop and give up telling stories. I’ll never be this good.
Pale Horse Coming is set in 1951 and is a story about Earl Swagger, the father of Bob Lee Swagger, the hero of Point of Impact and other novels. Hunter is as canny at triangulating his market as he is at plotting and characterization. For the liberal reader he offers two of their favorite villains, southern racists and McCarthyites. But that’s not what the heart of the book is. The heart of the book is heroism, and endurance, and keeping promises, and knowing how to defend yourself, and the conviction that sometimes you just have to employ violence to deliver the oppressed.
The story begins with Sam Vincent of Blue Eye, Arksansas, Earl’s lawyer friend who will someday be Bob Lee’s mentor, getting an offer from a Chicago law firm to run what seems to be an unusual but innocuous errand. A black man who once worked for one of their clients has been mentioned in a will, but can’t be contacted. Would Sam go to his last known address, Thebes, Mississippi, to see if he can get legal verification of the man’s death? They prefer a southerner to make the trip, they say, because he’ll understand the local culture better.
The money’s good and Sam needs the work, so he makes the trip. What he finds is an insane and frightening situation. A tiny town stuck in the 1850s, almost cut off from the outside world, where the only local industry is a “colored”-only prison, and where the black residents, even outside the prison walls, are entirely dominated by the white guards.
When Sam’s conscience forces him to protest what he sees, he finds himself in big trouble. Without spoiling the rest of it for you, I’ll say that Sam’s big trouble becomes Earl’s big trouble. Then follows a tale of unspeakable cruelty and incredible endurance, capped by Earl’s retribution, which is epic in scope.
A delightful element toward the end is Earl’s assembly of a commando force made up almost entirely of “old-timers”—famous shooters of the 1920s, all of them based on real characters who will be familiar to any gun enthusiast, and some of whom even I could identify behind their fictionalized names. The name “Seven Against Thebes” is employed a couple times.
Could not put the book down. It grabbed me from the beginning, and Hunter timed his plot twists and setbacks expertly to keep me on the hook all the way.
And behind it all, I was never allowed to forget that Earl will not live long. All his resolve to care for his family and raise his boy will come to an untimely end, an end Hunter has already chronicled. So there’s irony and tragedy too as seasoning in the stew.
Hunter lifts the thriller form above the level of popular fiction. I suspect he’ll be read and loved for a long, long time.
calon lan (Bonnie) of Dwell in Possibility reviews P.G. Wodehouse’s Piccadilly Jim–not the best. She loves Wodehouse, but this one just doesn’t burn it up, if you see what I mean. The problem? “There’s just too much going on. I couldn’t keep track of the characters, and frankly didn’t find them interesting enough to keep track of.”
Warning on following the link: music automatically plays (but at least the controls are easily found at the top of the page).
J.K. Rowling has been talking about her books lately, and in New York someone asked a question about Professor Dumbledore’s, the headmaster of Rowling’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, love life. The author answered hesitantly, “I always saw Dumbledore as gay.”
According to at least one report, the audience loudly applauded that revelation, to which Rowling responded she would have revealed it earlier had she known it would be well received.
Of course, this doesn’t sit well with me, but I guess we’ll have to live with it. Rowling appears to be in her right mind and not slipping into loony post-story “revelations,” ala George Lucas. When I first heard of this news, I doubted it. Even if she did say Dumbledore is gay and it isn’t an inference drawn from an unclear statement, I thought we may have to wait to hear what other statements she makes about her wildly popular series. If next year we hear her tell readers the hero of her stories is actually Hagrid, then we’ll know she’s flaky. But this appears to be genuine backstory, never before guessed or hinted at in the books. In a few decades if these books are still popular, many readers will probably doubt Rowling ever said this.
In related news, Rowling said the books have Christian inspirations. The Telegraph reports:
At one point Harry visits his parents’ graves and finds two biblical passages inscribed on their tombstones.
“They are very British books, so on a very practical note, Harry was going to find biblical quotations on tombstones,” [Rowling] said.
“But I think those two particular quotations he finds on the tombstones …they sum up, they almost epitomise, the whole series.”
She confessed that she does have doubts about Christianity and the afterlife, but she has not given up on her faith. To the reader who responds to this by asking how she could be Christian and have a major character, admirable in many ways, be a homosexual, I recommend practicing a bit of Christian tolerance. Did the Lord say, “Ye will know my disciples by their stance of current issues?” No, he said his disciples would love each other, even when we disagree.